The set of judicial and non-judicial mechanisms — criminal trials, truth commissions, reparations, lustration, and memorialization — through which societies emerging from mass atrocity or authoritarian rule attempt to reckon with the past, and the contested question of whether justice, truth, peace, and reconciliation can be simultaneously achieved.
After mass atrocity, a society must decide what to do with the perpetrators, the survivors, the truth, and the future — often all at once, under enormous time pressure, with no good options. Prosecute everyone and you destabilize the fragile government that replaced the old one. Amnesty everyone and you abandon the victims and tell future perpetrators that the calculus favors impunity. Truth commissions produce testimony without punishment. Reparations produce payments without accountability. Every mechanism transitional societies have tried has solved some of these problems and deepened others. Transitional justice is the field that tries to think clearly about which trade-offs are worth making.